The World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in partnership with the UK government, has developed guidelines for more ethical and efficient government procurement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Governments across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East are piloting these guidelines to improve their AI procurement processes.

Our entire financial system is built on trust. We can exchange otherwise worthless paper bills for fresh groceries, or swipe a piece of plastic for new clothes. But this trust--typically in a central government-backed bank--is changing. As our financial lives are rapidly digitized, the resulting data turns into fodder for AI. Companies like Apple, Facebook and Google see it as an opportunity to disrupt the entire experience of how people think about and engage with their money. But will we as consumers really get more control over our finances? In this first of a series on automation and our wallets, we explore a digital revolution in how we pay for things. This episode was produced by Anthony Green, with help from Jennifer Strong, Karen Hao, Will Douglas Heaven and Emma Cillekens.

Probability theory is far from being the most general mathematical theory of uncertainty. A number of arguments point at its inability to describe second-order ('Knightian') uncertainty. In response, a wide array of theories of uncertainty have been proposed, many of them generalisations of classical probability. As we show here, such frameworks can be organised into clusters sharing a common rationale, exhibit complex links, and are characterised by different levels of generality. Our goal is a critical appraisal of the current landscape in uncertainty theory.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great successes in many simulated tasks. The sample inefficiency problem makes applying traditional DRL methods to real-world robots a great challenge. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) -- a general model-free imitation learning method, allows robots to directly learn policies from expert trajectories in large environments. However, GAIL shares the limitation of other imitation learning methods that they can seldom surpass the performance of demonstrations. In this paper, to address the limit of GAIL, we propose GAN-Based Interactive Reinforcement Learning (GAIRL) from demonstration and human evaluative feedback by combining the advantages of GAIL and interactive reinforcement learning. We tested our proposed method in six physics-based control tasks, ranging from simple low-dimensional control tasks -- Cart Pole and Mountain Car, to difficult high-dimensional tasks -- Inverted Double Pendulum, Lunar Lander, Hopper and HalfCheetah. Our results suggest that with both optimal and suboptimal demonstrations, a GAIRL agent can always learn a more stable policy with optimal or close to optimal performance, while the performance of the GAIL agent is upper bounded by the performance of demonstrations or even worse than it. In addition, our results indicate the reason that GAIRL is superior over GAIL is the complementary effect of demonstrations and human evaluative feedback.

Engineers have created a creepy prototype webcam shaped just like the human eye, called the Eyecam. Inspired by animatronics, Eyecam attaches to the front of a computer monitor and looks left and right – and even blinks – while tracking the face of each individual during a video call. At first glance, it looks scarily realistic, right down to the wrinkles in the skin, the individual hairs that make up the eyebrows and the red vessels over the white of the eye. Eyecam – which is comprised of motors surrounded by 3D-printed silicone – is open source, meaning you could create your own version at home. Most webcams are too small to be seen - but it's unlikely you'll have the same problem with Eyecam, which has been created because'eyes are crucial for communication' Comedian Lewis Spears discovers Prince Philip's death live on-stage St. Vincent PM: Vaccinated cruise ship passengers evacuated first Eyecam has been created by Marc Teyssier and his team at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Saarland University, Germany.

Scientists in the US have brought the structure of a spider web to life by translating it into music – a technique that could help us communicate with spiders, they say. They assigned different frequencies of sound to strands of the web, creating'notes' that they combined in patterns, based on the web's 3D structure, to generate melodies. The eerie piece of music, which lasts just over a minute, sounds like the soundtrack for an eerie dystopian sci-fi horror film. It was created by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with laser scanning technology and image processing tools. The experts say spider webs could provide a new source for musical inspiration and provide a form of cross-species communication.

Major advancement in the performance of machine translation models has been made possible in part thanks to the availability of large-scale parallel corpora. But for most languages in the world, the existence of such corpora is rare. Emakhuwa, a language spoken in Mozambique, is like most African languages low-resource in NLP terms. It lacks both computational and linguistic resources and, to the best of our knowledge, few parallel corpora including Emakhuwa already exist. In this paper we describe the creation of the Emakhuwa-Portuguese parallel corpus, which is a collection of texts from the Jehovah's Witness website and a variety of other sources including the African Story Book website, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Mozambican legal documents. The dataset contains 47,415 sentence pairs, amounting to 699,976 word tokens of Emakhuwa and 877,595 word tokens in Portuguese. After normalization processes which remain to be completed, the corpus will be made freely available for research use.

While traditional corpus-level evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) correlate well with fluency, they struggle to reflect adequacy. Model-based MT metrics trained on segment-level human judgments have emerged as an attractive replacement due to strong correlation results. These models, however, require potentially expensive re-training for new domains and languages. Furthermore, their decisions are inherently non-transparent and appear to reflect unwelcome biases. We explore the simple type-based classifier metric, MacroF1, and study its applicability to MT evaluation. We find that MacroF1 is competitive on direct assessment, and outperforms others in indicating downstream cross-lingual information retrieval task performance. Further, we show that MacroF1 can be used to effectively compare supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation, and reveal significant qualitative differences in the methods' outputs.

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) are envisioned to transform the future industrial and private transportation sectors. Due to the complexity of the systems, functional verification and validation of safety aspects are essential before the technology merges into the public domain. In recent years, a scenario-driven approach has gained acceptance for CAVs emphasizing the requirement of a solid data basis of scenarios. The large-scale research facility Test Bed Lower Saxony (TFNDS) enables the provision of substantial information for a database of scenarios on motorways. For that purpose, however, the scenarios of interest must be identified and categorized in the collected trajectory data. This work addresses this problem and proposes a framework for on-ramp scenario identification that also enables for scenario categorization and assessment. The efficacy of the framework is shown with a dataset collected on the TFNDS.

As the role of algorithmic systems and processes increases in society, so does the risk of bias, which can result in discrimination against individuals and social groups. Research on algorithmic bias has exploded in recent years, highlighting both the problems of bias, and the potential solutions, in terms of algorithmic transparency (AT). Transparency is important for facilitating fairness management as well as explainability in algorithms; however, the concept of diversity, and its relationship to bias and transparency, has been largely left out of the discussion. We reflect on the relationship between diversity and bias, arguing that diversity drives the need for transparency. Using a perspective-taking lens, which takes diversity as a given, we propose a conceptual framework to characterize the problem and solution spaces of AT, to aid its application in algorithmic systems. Example cases from three research domains are described using our framework.